Posted on 06/15/2011 2:22:25 PM PDT by Syncro
GET RID OF GOVERNMENT -- BUT FIRST MAKE ME PRESIDENT!
June 15, 2011I consider all Republican debates time-fillers until New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie jumps in, but Monday night's debate did crystallize for me why I dislike libertarians. (Except one, who is a friend of mine and not crazy.)
They lure you in with talk of small government and then immediately start babbling about drug legalization or gay marriage.
"Get the government out of it" is a good and constitutionally correct answer to many questions, but it's not a one-size-fits-all answer to all questions.
It was a good answer, for example, when libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, was asked about government assistance to private enterprise and government involvement in the housing market.
But it's a chicken-s**t, I-don't-want-to-upset-my-video-store-clerk-base answer when it comes to gay marriage.
Asked about gay marriage, Paul said, in full:
"The federal government shouldn't be involved. I wouldn't support an amendment (prohibiting gay marriage). But let me suggest -- one of the ways to solve this ongoing debate about marriage, look up in the dictionary. We know what marriage is all about. But then, get the government out of it. ... Why doesn't it go to the church? And why doesn't it go to the individuals? I don't think government should give us a license to get married. It should be in the church."
If state governments stop officially registering marriages, then who gets to adopt? How are child support and child custody issues determined if the government doesn't recognize marriage? How about a private company's health care plans -- whom will those cover? Who has legal authority to issue "do not resuscitate" orders to doctors? (Of course, under Obamacare we won't be resuscitating anyone.)
Who inherits in the absence of a will? Who is entitled to a person's Social Security and Medicare benefits? How do you know if you're divorced and able to remarry? Where would liberals get their phony statistics about most marriages ending in divorce?Read More »
I am making a different point than what you address:
>>Hurting traditional marriage will
.... hurt our culture ...
... which degrades the ethics of self-responsibility ...
... which makes people turn to “Uncle Sam” for paternalistic nanny-statism
... which hurts the Constitution, based on limited govt.<<
THAT IS MY POINT. if you want limited govt, then DEFEND MARRIAGE AS IS. This is what Libertarians dont get, the CULTURAL CONDITIONS FOR LIBERTY REQUIRES STRONG SELF-RELIANT SOCIAL MORES AND FAMILY VALUES. Marriage supports that, dissolving marriage hurts that. If men were amoral monsters, you’d need a police state to keep people in line.
Defining marriage a between one man and one woman is NOT an intrusion, it is merely a societal standard defined in law, and thereby buttressed by law.
If you dont want to get married, you dont have to, so marriage is not an intrusion.
SB777, people like WOSG don’t understand that, as a door can swing in two directions, a federal court that can give you whatever you want under “separate but equal” and “right to contract” can just as easily take it away with “penumbras and emanations.” The problem has arisen because we’ve allowed judges to become fiction writers creating federal rights that must be upheld. In the past, this was accomplished with contraception and abortion, and now the left has moved on to a federal right to gay marriage, which will now be imposed on the states. The same stupidity on the left is present in people on the right when they both try to create rights to enforce federally, when they should be fighting for federalism. Federal courts that removed themselves from jurisdiction over state laws would at least allow people to MOVE if a state court were to try to impose some truly outlandish ‘right,’ say, a right to pederasty for their children, or a right for children to divorce their parents (not wholly impossible given UN and gay tendencies). Scalia is far inferior to Thomas in failing to stand up for this federalist separation of powers.
Provide evidence for this libel, that is if place any value on accuracy. Ron Paul has repeatedly said that he thinks Bin Laden knocked down the towers. In fact, the view that Bin Laden did it is the lynchpin of his blowback thesis. Again, put up or shut up!
Let me know if you'd like to be added to the Ann Coulter ping list.
There are reasons we have laws governing important institutions, such as marriage. As inCompare with the Kennedy slogan,landscapinghome remodeling, you don't remove a wall until you know why it was put there.
'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'The trouble is that when a Kennedy asks, "Why not?" it isn't a serious question but a flippant dismissal of the serious point that just because you don't know why that wall is there is no guarantee that the floor above it won't - suddenly or gradually - sag down when it is removed.All knowledge is partial. Journalists and other liberals simply are too arrogant to recognize the limits of their articulated "rationality." Sometimes neither the conservative nor the "liberal" can fully articulate why the wall is there - until the "liberal" removes the wall, and time reveals some hidden virtue which was lost with it.
She doesn’t use the “k” word, but she does effectively slice and dice Congressman Paul into bite-sized pieces.
I gotta say you won that one big time.
At first I thought you were a serious poster, but now you admit you are just trying to hook people into believing you meant what you posted.
Duly noted and kudos to you, it worked---I fell for it bigtime.
I can usually pick out agitators right away.
Don't feel bad though, there are others that don't "get" Coulter and it shows in thier posts, such as your.
As my first post said to you, your strong suit is lurking, Lurker.
Thanks for helping to keep this thread alive.
BUMP back!
And your strong point being that a small thypo throwz (there is another one for you so you can feel superior) you off into a rant.
Taking arguments to FR mail won't get a response from me about the content, but does expose you as a weak and confrontational poster.
Here is my post to you that I guess you didn't see, or chose to ignore.
I've enlarged part of it for you:
If you can't debate it here on the public forum DON'T send me FR mail with ridiculous statements that just show that you are in denial
That's weak.
Start here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGyhlNY0y1k
Then you can check out what Michelle Malkin has to say about your St Paul here:
http://michellemalkin.com/2007/05/19/trutheriness-and-ron-paul/
BTW, as the courts ruled in the “Westmoreland” case decades ago, public figures and politicians cannot claim libel or slander. Therefore that demented tinfoil-hat-wearing kook known as Ron Paul is fair game.
As you’ve been told countless times by dozens of FReepers, libertarians are NOT conservatives. So take your Paultard propaganda to those featherbrained imbeciles who are cranially vacant enough to buy it. Conservatives know about Paul’s line of bovine scatology and want nothing to do with it or him.
Wow!!! Is that the best you have e.g. that he called for an investigation of 9-11?! Please note that neither you nor your “links” provided a quotation from Paul claiming that the U.S. government was behind 9-11. In fact, the youtube showed him yet again stating that Bin Laden did it. I hope you never get on a jury!
I’ve always been smart enough to get out of jury duty.
It would interfere with my practice time.
Too smart to get out of a jury duty? That’s sounds like something like a ruggedly anti-statist Ron Paulian would say. My...my.
That’s not what I said. Please re-read my post.
Ann Coulter is the best! Here in the real world we are sick of social experiments on children. Stop trying to justify more. Professional Libertarians who want to open borders but cut down the wall of marriage are destroying America.
Smart enough to get out of a jury duty? That’s sound like something like an anti-statist “anti-American” Ron Paulian would say. My...my.
This is close but not quite correct. Review New York Times v Sullivan, the key case of modern libel law.
The four categories of people, as far as modern libel law is concerned, are public officials, public figures, and limited public figures, all contrasted with private persons. It is difficult but not impossible for a public official or public figure to win a libel lawsuit. It is considerably easier for a person who is not in the public eye to do so.
The concept is that public officials should not be able to use the court system to intimidate press criticism, and other people in the public eye such as actors and prominent businessmen have other ways to convey their response to attacks in the press.
But what about situations where a newspaper prints something which is factually wrong?
Under New York Times v Sullivan and subsequent case law, a public official or public figure must not only show that the newspaper was factually wrong but also that it acted with both actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth. Those two higher tests don't need to be met by private parties.
The details get extremely complicated, but the short version is that a public official or public figure can't go to court and sue a newspaper because of a factual error as long as the newspaper wasn't acting maliciously toward its target and had procedures in place to prevent such errors. Mistakes happen, especially in articles written on deadline, and a newspaper shouldn't be hauled into court based on a technicality if no malicious intent or reckless disregard for the truth can be shown.
This is very different from the laws of countries like Britain and France which to some extent restrict the ability of the press to intrude into the “privacy” of government officials. That's part of how our current International Monetary Fund sex scandal with Dominique Strauss-Kahn happened; the French press knew about the history of the moral conduct of the man accused but didn't cover it, so a bit of review of how we got to our current American libel laws could help.
Truth is now an absolute defense against libel, but that was not always the case. A colonial-era precedent underlies our modern First Amendment; a newspaper owner was thrown into jail for months for printing accurate attacks on the colonial governor and then released because the jury refused to follow existing law and convict him. Because of that case, basically you can say anything about anyone as long as you can prove it's true.
Prior English law said that even if something printed was true, if it caused a government official to fall into disrepute, it was criminal libel and the person could be not only fined but also jailed on the grounds that it caused the general public to disrespect the institutions of government. John Peter Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, was regularly attacking Gov. William Cosby (probably on behalf of behind-the-scenes political opponents of the governor), was charged with seditious libel, but was acquitted in 1735 because the jury refused to follow the law at the time.
A corollary of this principle that truth is an absolute defense against libel is that if something can't be proven to be true or false, it can't be libelous. That's why opinion is protected. You have every right to call Ron Paul a “demented tinfoil-hat-wearing kook” because that's a statement of opinion, not an assertion of fact; no reasonable person would believe you are actually asserting that Paul's headgear is made of tinfoil, and criticism based solely on opinion and not factual assertions is not libelous, though all facts stated have to be true.
I'm writing this because the issues involved in libel law are far more important than the subject of this thread. In an internet era, anyone posting on the internet about this type of thing needs to understand libel law in ways that for a prior generation only the professional media needed to know.
Ahem: I understand fully the problems of Federal courts and Judges. A judge in Texas this week convicted a woman of felony child abuse for spanking her young child. An absurdity based on not just misreading law, but misunderstanding parental rights and responsibilities.
A good source for understanding our judicial derangement is Bork’s “Tempting of America” and a good source for understanding our cultural derangement is Bork’s “Slouching towards Gomorrah”. Interestingly, these derangements are related.
While we are in the ‘here’s what X doesnt understand ... the key thing that Libertarians don’t understand is this:
We will never have our freedom if we ignore the cultural conditions that enable it.
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